


transformation, imagination, memory

by anupturnedboat



Category: The Originals (TV)
Genre: Artist Klaus, Canon Compliant, Family, Gen, Painting, Pre-Canon, Self-Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-21
Updated: 2016-05-21
Packaged: 2018-06-09 18:11:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6917788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anupturnedboat/pseuds/anupturnedboat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They paint in pastels; his heart and Degas’ hands. French Creole homes with wide porches, auspicious skies, chicory flowers and oak groves covered in Spanish moss.</p><p>Post 3x20</p>
            </blockquote>





	transformation, imagination, memory

Degas paints New Orleans in oils, a city of muted colors, convalescing and crippled, full of men in shoddy suits counting cotton.

It isn’t the fledgling city tenaciously etching out its importance alongside the mighty muddy Mississippi of his memories. The city he has wound tight in his fist over the past hundred years. The city he’s molded into his image and become a monster for.

But, the artist has captured a certain expression of color, of movement, of life, within his brushstrokes. Something that has eluded Klaus. It irks and confounds him that his own technical hand only turns his subjects into perfect stone tableaus.

Sometimes he has premonitions of this painted city on fire, flooded out, and full of mournful howling wolves. His nightmares are composed of visions of everything spiraling out of his control, of stakes through the hearts of his family, the blood of people not yet born, people he will someday love. And pain so unbearable that his immortal existence will cry out for deliverance.

He comes, not seeking ballerinas or laundresses, but something of color, imagination, of memory that he is incapable of producing.

The cantankerous painter is surprisingly versed in how to keep vampires out of his studio. It makes Klaus admire his work a little more. Perhaps saves his life, because the ease of killing runs through him now like taking breath. And he has no patience for the weak.

Degas keeps himself hidden away, but Klaus is nothing if not persistent, and when at last he has the painter in his grasp, it dawns on him that maybe he doesn’t want to know. Maybe his admiration is just envy in disguise, and a desire to snuff out that which he cannot usurp.

But self-reflection prevails, and instead of killing he compels the man’s hands, his brushes, his palettes.

They paint in pastels; his heart and Degas’ hands. French Creole homes with wide porches, auspicious skies, chicory flowers and oak groves covered in Spanish moss.

The results are both lively and melancholy and do not reflect his current cruel grip. It makes him feel weak and exposed. Like a bitter raw root. And perhaps this whole experiment has been a colossal mistake.

One he destroys, his heart is his throat, his fist through canvas for reasons he cannot articulate. The other, number 21, he covers in black. It will not hang in any museum.

In 1922, he and his family flee New Orleans with few possessions. He moves the canvas to a vault in Chicago and never looks at it again.

On the night he dispatches yet another enemy, avenges yet another loved one, he retrieves the painting and hangs it in his daughter's room.

Elijah acknowledges it with a slight nod of his head, and Klaus catches Hayley running her fingers over the sweeping strokes of color.

Together they sit, fractured, but not broken pledging allegiance to each other, to this family, to finding a way to make things right with Marcel and Kol. And as his daughter reaches for him, her small soft hands brushing against his cold, hard skin, he is transformed.


End file.
